(FINAL POST of 2013 Exchange) Aiya! My Last Blog Post!

(Deanna)

Today was our official first day in Beijing. I was woken up by a woman telling people to get up at 6 am and then proceeded to go back to sleep for a little while longer. We all finally woke up at around 7:30am when we realised we were approaching the station in Beijing. Me being on the top bunk of our section I had to throw things down with Veronica to Brandon and Patty and then organize ourselves to get off the train. In getting off the train, we met our tour guide Lily. We walked about ten minutes to get to the parking lot where our van was (in Beijing, vehicles cannot always park on the street due to the large population so there are many parking lots). We went to the hotel, took showers and ate breakfast.

"Might as well throw Platform 9&3/4 in there!"

(Brandon)

Hello from Ho Chi Minh! We got on the wrong train (no one explained "platform 2" was the first floor of the station), largely due to the tickets being in Chinese and the conductors being nonexistent. Well,
it looks like we're going to have to learn Vietnamese now.

Until Next Time, Hangzhou

(Patty)

Today was the last day of our last weekend with our host families, and so three of the four bears (plus Mifield) (Brandon was busy tea shopping) met up to go ice skating. I, for one was excited to get back on the ice and really enjoyed teaching some of the other kids how to skate (which also provided some comic relief). Afterwards, we got Korean BBQ and went to go see the new Oz Movie, which was.. Interesting. In the evening, I ate a final meal with the Ye family, and packed all my stuff for Beijing.